Tiye (c. 1398 BC – 1338 BC, also spelled Taia, Tiy and Tiyi) was the
daughter of Yuya and Tjuyu (also spelled Thuyu). She became the Great
Royal Wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III. She was the mother of
Akhenaten and grandmother of Tutankhamun. Her mummy was identified as
"The Elder Lady" found in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV35) in 2010.

The origin of the Etruscan people has been a source of major
controversy for the past 2,500 years, and several hypotheses have been
proposed to explain their language and sophisticated culture, including
an Aegean/Anatolian origin. To address this issue, we analyzed the
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of 322 subjects from three well-defined areas
of Tuscany and compared their sequence variation with that of 55 western
Eurasian populations. Interpopulation comparisons reveal that the
modern population of Murlo, a small town of Etruscan origin, is
characterized by an unusually high frequency (17.5%) of Near Eastern
mtDNA haplogroups. Each of these haplogroups is represented by different
haplotypes, thus dismissing the possibility that the genetic allocation
of the Murlo people is due to drift. Other Tuscan populations do not
show the same striking feature; however, overall, ∼5% of mtDNA
haplotypes in Tuscany are shared exclusively between Tuscans and Near
Easterners and occupy terminal positions in the phylogeny. These
findings support a direct and rather recent genetic input from the Near
East—a scenario in agreement with the Lydian origin of Etruscans. Such a
genetic contribution has been extensively diluted by admixture, but it
appears that there are still locations in Tuscany, such as Murlo, where
traces of its arrival are easily detectable.

Latin alphabets to modern Roman alphabets

Looking once more at Boeree's chart of the Evolution of the
Greek and Latin alphabets, it is noticeable that the Latin alphabet
seems to be "missing" a few letters. Where did the extra ones come from
that we use?

It is generally agreed that the Roman alphabet is mainly derived from the Etruscan writing system.

The Letter “C”Etruscan
had no "voiced plosives". In English, b, d and g are voiced plosives,
while ph, and th are not. The "plosive" refers to closure of the oral
cavity, a build up of pressure with vocal cord vibration, ("voiced"),
followed by sudden release. The Etruscan, C, was derived from the Greek
gamma. The letter G appeared around 230 BCE.

Here is another view of the Greek alphabet with lower case versions and approximate English pronunciations:

Early LatinA B CG D E F(Z) H I K L M N O P Q R S T V Y XThe following is from Omniglot1"There
were no lowercase letters, and K, Y and Z were only used for writing
words of Greek origin. The letters J, U and W were added later to write
languages other than Latin. J is a variant of I, U is a variant of V,
and W was introduced as a 'double-v' to make a distinction between the
sounds we know as 'v' and 'w' which was unnecessary in Latin."

Vajda2 is a very useful resource on this. He also discusses the I.P.A. or International Phonetic Alphabet.

Ancient Latin alphabetA
chart from Omniglot(1) shows an even earlier version of the Latin
alphabet dating from 6th Century BCE. Here it is called the Ancient
Latin alphabet:

Notice
the clear Etruscan shape to the letters. It is interesting to note that
there were several different shapes for the same letter, bearing in
mind that they had no lower case letters.

The earliest Latin
inscription is on a cloak pin (a fibula) which was found in Palestrina
(Praeneste) in the 6th century BCE. It is now known as the Pranaeste
Fibula. Here are two images, the second one enabling the script to be
seen more clearly:

and here is a reversal of the inscription:

The
fibula was thought to originate from the 7th century BCE. It is
inscribed with a text that appears to be written in Old Latin, here
transcribed to English letters:MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI

The
equivalent Classical Latin sentence obtained by applying the
appropriate differences between Old Latin and Classical Latin would
probably have been:

MANIVS ME FECIT NVMERIO

translated as:

MANIUS FASHIONED ME FOR NUMERIUS.

Debate
continues over whether the inscription was a hoax, perpetrated at the
beginning of the 20th century by a German scholar, or not!

Roman alphabet for Latin

Here is the Roman alphabet for Latin. They used only 23 letters.

Modern Latin alphabetHere is the more familiar version of the alphabet:

It is observed by Omniglot1 that the lower case versions of the capital letters derived from cursive script variations of the upper case letters.

The
Latin alphabet is the "parent" of most Western European alphabets and,
as we discussed last time, it comes from the Greek alphabet, and was
also influenced by the Etruscan alphabet.. However some, like Vajda1, see the Greek alphabet as the most important root of modern alphabets.

Looking
at the chart here from an earlier post, it can be seen that Ancient
Greek was the branching point for two important language streams, apart
from Modern Greek. Our alphabet, shown as Modern Roman, is on one
branch and on the other is Modern Cyrillic, used by speakers of Russian.

Future

I
suppose it's all about evolution. The April Fool's Day joke I put on
the first Post is an example, but how far fetched is it? The joke was
that Barack Obama was proposing a new letter, but is this the way change
begins?

Could our alphabet evolve further?

Here is a proposal by Worley1"Rethinking the English Alphabet

English
spelling is inconsistent, inefficient, and insufficient. Almost the
instant English spelling was codified people have wanted to improve it,
but found it almost impossible to introduce changes. Perhaps equally
troubling, though less commonly addressed, is the English alphabet, full
of redundant letters. So, in the spirit of countless orthography
reformers, I propose the following changes to the English alphabet.

First,
we drop the letter "x". It appears rarely, and when it does it always
makes a sound that is either the same as "z" or "ks". Next, since "c"
always either sounds like a "k" or an "s", I propose we drop it, too.
Third, I propose we drop "q", since it makes the same sound as "k".
This leaves us with 23 letters, so I additionally propose we replace "y"
by the digraph "ij" to keep the number of letters in English even (this
is for the sake of making rot11 symmetric, just as rot13 is today).

My
changes require only direct substitutions of letters; the spellings
don't change, just the symbols, thus it could easily be accomplished by
substitution on the computer to bring electronic texts into the modern
spelling. If this alphabet was adopted by schools, we could be using
this simplified system in a generation.

I realize, of course,
that there is no hope of my improvements taking root; it's simply not
better enough to motivate people through the transition. But it ic a
fun mentay eksersize!"

the above was written in the font "Brand New Alphabet" by Rachel Spoon @ http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/

Being
the final post it has really been a gentle walk to the finish line. I
found a number of references which describe how the Ancient Latin
alphabet became the Roman alphabet became the Modern Roman alphabet but I
found either the sources to be too brief, or they got way too difficult
for an amateur researcher like me. In the end, I had to omit quite a
lot of detail about the way the Ancient Latin alphabet was pronounced
and the way the Roman alphabet was pronounced due to the linguistic
complexity of the discussion. I found this disappointing but inevitable,
I suppose. I had to ignore labial fricatives, voiced and non-voiced
plosives, and a whole thesis on a language's phonemes - disappointingly!
However, I have found some wonderful resources and I have mentioned
them later on.

document your research findings so far

People
started drawing pictures on cave walls but there was no thought, or
metacognition happening. That is, they could not write in a way which
expressed insight into their own thinking, as came much later on. There
have been so many highlights for me doing this project! The
hieroglyphics of Egypt and the origins of the Proto- S(e/i)mitic
language, the pervasive influence of varieties of Hebrew on later
languages, the amazing Etruscans whose language just disappeared as they
became part of Roman civilisation - there have been so many highlights!
The main outcomes of the research are that alphabets change because:* the speakers of the language allow "foreign" words to enter their vocabulary and they need new characters to write them*
the speakers may decide they need say, vowels, because their's is
essentially a consonantal alphabet, and other alphabets in nearby
countries have the sounds that they want* the speakers of the
language are concerned that their language may be lost as they
assimilate the culture of another people - e.g. the speakers of Hebrew
added diacritics to their characters for speech and even chanting. The
Etruscans, unfortunately, did not take this path.* over time,
letters are omitted from certain words and diacritics are used to
signify that this process has occurred e.g. the French omitting the "s"
in estude and "inventing" the acute accent to place on the "e".

include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

The
problem this week was how to finish. The concept that "our" alphabet is
something set in concrete is quite foreign to me. With the advent of
texting and email, many abbreviations have crept into common usage and I
wonder how long before further contractions become "accepted" as normal
expression? The April 1st joke about Obama's new letter, the "th",
started me thinking. Given typography is a growth industry, it is not
unlikely that changes are occurring to the way we write letters every
day, yet very slowly.

This led me to researching Wim Crouwel's "machine" alphabet from the 1967(There is also YouTube on this - see right hand side movie clips)

Here
is the cover of his "proposed" typeface for computer representations of
the alphabet on screens. He didn't like the way curves were pixellated
by the early printers and screens and so he "proposed a new font with no
curves and only 45 degree angle line segments".

there
are people in Ethiopia who are using one of the longest unchanged
languages in the world. I didn't manage to discuss this in the posts.

Hebrew wins the prize for the language which has been continuously recorded for the longest time.

Just because two scripts look the same, doesn't mean that the languages are linguistically related

Two languages which have very different scripts may be quite closely related, linguistically.

There
are black Americans learning hieroglyphics, via YouTube, so that they
can translate original material which they believe is important to their
understanding of their own history.

the website
Omniglot.com is an amazing resource. You really must have a look at it.
It is also very useful when constructing Dewey numbers because it can
tell you which languages are derived from Devangari - quite handy!